Friendly Fires’ Jack Savidge Writes For NME On The New Music Making Him Move

Friendly fires’ Jack Savidge returns with his latest new music tips for NME

I’ve never been quite sure why but the period between September and New Years always feels like the best for raving. Something about the plunging mercury gets everyone in the mood for parties, powders, and pounding techno music. In honour of this fact here’s a few bits of all flavours you might be losing your braincells to over peak wintertime.

Catford’s Love Ssega might have a history with Radio 1’s favourite cello-botherers Clean Bandit, but his long-awaited solo material is cut from a slightly different cloth. Taking the jinking basslines and brittle guitars of Tom Tom Club, Arthur Russell and a host of lesser-known New York post-punk luminaries, ‘Minds’ is a winding multi-part journey of the magnitude of !!!’s ‘Me And Giuliani Down By The Schoolyard’. Ssega’s versatile vocals go from group cantations, all the way down to contemplative rapping and then up again to soaring choruses. There’s an album on the way next year, which is sure to be a biggy.

Bjarki’s ‘I Wanna Go Bang’ is an honest to goodness warehouse techno hit, its burbled robot-voice hook big and simple enough to carve out a path from downstairs at the Berghain all the way to the radio. Its being hammered by absolutely flipping everyone right now, so why not? It seems like hard, fast techno is such a draw in the clubs and dance tents of the world, we’re long overdue an LFO ‘LFO’ moment.

Joakim Bouaziz has long been an important producer in and around the discothèques, moving deftly between house, disco and weirder tropicalia. Rejoicing under a new nom de guerre – Jimi Bazzouka – he’s delved deep into his collection of Afro, World and Balearic oddities to produce a series of edit 12”s that have disappeared off the shelves like reduced loaves of love. As with a lot of edit releases, the joy comes less from production touches than the curatorial skill in finding the source material. The versions of Wings’ ‘Let ‘Em In’ and Jan Hammer’s ‘Don’t You Know’ are worth the inflated Discogs price alone. Other tracks are more percussive, Ethiopiques style workouts – all
highly essential.

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LA’s Delroy Edwards has been around for a minute making double hard drum machine and synth jams. Legend has it he records at high volume to virgin VHS tape, giving his tracks their characteristic crunchy distortion. He’s just released a new set of slightly different styled tracks entitled ‘Slowed Down Funk’ [for download here]. While superficially each track broadly does what it says on the tin, taken as a whole body its like a midnight ride through dusk in LA, with new jack swing and funk filtering a crackly radio and a heady codeine buzz.